III

Whatis Martynov’s muddle-headedness due to? To the fact that he confounds
democratic revolution with socialist revolution; that he overlooks the role of
the intermediate stratum of the people lying between the
“bourgeoisie” and the “proletariat” (the petty-bourgeois
masses of the urban and rural poor, the “semi-proletarians”, the
semi-proprietors); and that he fails to understand the true meaning of our
minimum programme. Martynov has heard that it is wrong for a socialist to
participate in a bourgeois Cabinet (when the proletariat is struggling for the
socialist revolution), and he hastens to “understand” this as
meaning that we should not participate with the revolutionary bourgeois
democrats in the democratic revolution and in the dictatorship that is
essential for the full accomplishment of such a revolution. Martynov read our
minimum programme, but he missed the fact that the strict distinction it draws
between transformations that can be carried out in a bourgeois society and
socialist transformations is not merely booklore but is of the most vital,
practical significance; he missed the fact that in a revolutionary period this
programme must be immediately tested and applied in practice. It did not occur
to him that rejecting the idea of the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship in
the period of the autocracy’s downfall is tantamount to renouncing the
fulfilment of our minimum programme. Indeed, let us but consider all the
economic and political transformations formulated in that programme—the
demand for the republic, for arming the people, for the separation of the Church
from the State, for full democratic liberties, and for decisive economic
reforms. Is it not clear that these transformations cannot possibly be brought
about in a bourgeois society without the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship
of the lower classes? Is it not clear that it is not the proletariat alone, as
distinct from the “bourgeoisie”, that is referred to here, but the
“lower classes”, which are the active motive force of every
democratic revolution? These classes are the proletariat plus the
scores of millions of urban and rural poor whose conditions of existence are
petty-bourgeois. Without a doubt, very many representatives of these masses
belong to the bourgeoisie. But
there is still less doubt that the complete establishment of democracy is in the
interests of these masses, and that the more enlightened these masses are, the
more inevitable will be their struggle for the complete establishment of
democracy. Of course, a Social-Democrat will never forget the dual political
and economic nature of the petty-bourgeois urban and rural masses; he will never
forget the need for a separate and independent class organisation of the
proletariat, which struggles for socialism. But neither will he forget that
these masses have “a future as well as a past, judgement as well
as prejuduces”,[1]
a judgement that urges them onward towards the
revolutionary-democratic dictatorship; he will not for get that enlightenment is
not obtained from books alone, and not so much from books even as from the very
progress of the revolution, which opens the eyes of the people and gives them a
political schooling. Under such circumstances, a theory that rejects the idea of
the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship cannot be otherwise designated than as
a philosophical justification of political backwardness.

Therevolutionary Social-Democrat will reject such a theory with contempt. He
will not confine himself on the eve of the revolution to pointing out what will
happen “if the worst comes to the worst”. Rather, he will also show
the possibility of a better outcome. He will dream—he is obliged to dream
if he is not a hopeless philistine—that, after the vast experience of
Europe, after the unparalleled upsurge of energy among the working class in
Russia, we shall succeed in lighting a revolutionary beacon that will illumine
more brightly than ever before the path of the unenlightened and downtrodden
masses; that we shall succeed, standing as we do on the shoulders of a number of
revolutionary gene rations of Europe, in realising all the democratic
transformations, the whole of our minimum programme, with a
thoroughness never equalled
before. We shall succeed in ensuring that the Russian revolution is not a
movement of a few months, but a movement of many years; that it leads, not
merely to a few paltry concessions from the powers that be, but to the complete
overthrow of those powers. And if we succeed in achieving this, then ... the
revolutionary conflagration will spread to Europe; the European worker,
languishing under bourgeois reaction, will rise in his turn
and show us “how it is done”; then the revolutionary upsurge in
Europe will have a repercussive effect upon Russia and will convert an
epoch of a few revolutionary years into an era of several revolutionary
decades; then—but we shall have ample time to say what we shall do
“then”, not from the cursed remoteness of Geneva, but at
meetings of thousands of workers in the streets of Moscow and
St. Petersburg, at the free village meetings of the Russian
“muzhiks”.